There's places where they say its cold At 45 degrees And places where it gets so cold It makes you lock your knees. There's regions where the cusswords hang All frozen through the winter And come to life at the start of Spring Making raucous roars a-splinter. There are lands where the sun never shows its face Throughout the winter's day And places where the white bears live Where it's too damn cold to pray. But the coldest stretch I ever saw And the toughest winter's way Was the trek where Ma nearly broke her neck Making Thirty Four of Kay.

It was warm enough when we started out Down in Thirtythree and Six. And when Mom said she'd had a thought, We thought we knew her tricks. So we lazed around by the fire bright In a warm and friendly snow, And Mom explained what she had in mind, And where she planned to go.

Wal, the dogs were stretched in their snow-hole beds Dreaming of canine beers, But when she spoke each raised his head, And flattened out his ears. And they all shivered, as if a chill Or a williwaw, as they say, Had come sweeping down from the northern peaks Out by Thirty Four of Kay.

Species across the Universe have thanked me for extincting the freds. Your species has not yet done so. Be that as it may, I do not expect thanks for doing an unpleasant, but very necessary, job that will permit the Universe to evolve as my plan envisions it.

Just for your information, the production line that permitted such a flawed product has been shut down and the managerial staff reassigned to less critical areas, such as janitorial work. A few eons cleaning the toilets will help restore their humility.

I don't believe that post is from the Universal Overmind at all. Why would he be bragging like that, as though he were some two-bit Terran middle-management bureaucrat, or a scruffy Earthling hippy with pseudo-imaginary literary aspirations? It just doesn't add up, somehow...

Whoever HAS caused the Freds to go extinct, I thank them, he, she or it from the bottom of my heart. The Freds sucked. They had no redeeming qualities and were a pain in the arse. I will not miss them one bit.

Universal Overmind, you have now been thanked fullsomely by at least one human being!

What you know about gluons would fill the 11th dimension. But you have plenty of company. Scientists at the GHC last Tuesday afternoon after lunch, attempted to isolate gluons in a magnetic bottle, only to discover that the magbottles are now permanently stuck. Being right outside the collision sensor chamber, getting them removed is crucial to isolate other particles. If it can not be moved, the entire collider may have to be moved. No one knows for sure but it has been suggested that the chamber has glued itself to the 2nd, 7th and 11th dimension. When asked what this meant Dr. Schrodinger said "Crap".

This "Universal Overmind" character is an obvious impostor! The real Universal Overmind would never refer to freds as "the freds".

It was established long ago, during the MOAB's early days, that "freds" is singular, plural, and communal. One member of the species is simply "freds", not "a fred". A dozen of them are "freds", not "a dozen freds". And the entire species is simply "freds", not "the freds".

That the real Universal Overmind would make such a blatant cosmogrammatical error is utterly inconcievable. Therefore, we can only conclude that some dipwad is trying to jerk us around and MOABites don't jerk easily!

I may have made an error on those coordinates. Chongo tells me that a lawyer in Schenectady mysteriously vanished in a puff of smoke yesterday, leaving nothing behind but a small container full of garlic cheese dip.

Could there be a connection here?

Floribama is some godforsaken piece of territory in the Deep South, but no one can agree on exactly where it is.

"tejas" is the Mexican pronunciation of "Texas", providing you pronounce the "j" like an "h".

You're wicked, LH. But keep up the good work--fewer attorneys is a good thing.

MOM is amazed at how happy the birds are today in the sunshine. She's trying to duplicate that scene from Home Alone 2 with the bird lady in the park. It's getting the birdseed to stick to her clothes that is the problem. Any suggestions?

Oh, dear. A friend just called. He says that the bridge over "The Narrows" just vanished in a flast of blue light! Several casino-goers are missing, and the Atherley Arms Hotel, Orillia's only strip joint, has received serious collateral damage.

Could it be terrorists? But why would they strike at Orillia? Nothing EVER happens here.

Gluon is working on becoming multilingual. In recognition of his/her/its bispecial roots he/she/it is learning to speak Duck and Dog as well as Duckdog.

Mastering "Quack!" was a breeze and "Arf!" wasn't as difficult as one might imagine. But that howling at the moon stuff is really posing posing a bit of a challenge. Try to imagine Donald Duck attempting to imitate a pack of coyotes. That's not exactly what it sounds like, but it's within the tristate area.

No, Gluon is not naturally bilingual. He* would be if he'd had an opportunity to learn duck or dog from either of his parents, but the actual time Gluon spent with his parents was tragically short. He fell out of his cradle the day after he was bratched** and accidentally slipped into a seventeen-dimensional vortex. It took him roughly 350 of our years to find his way out of the vortex (though it only seemed like a few seconds to Gluon). By the time he returned to our spatial plane, his parents were not even distant memories to anyone else. He found himself alone, and with an insatiable craving for cracked corn mixed with Alpo. He also found that the only sound he was innately capable of making was "QUARK!", and while he has learned to convey an unlimited number of meanings using that one "word", he has recently felt a desire to "get in touch with his roots" by learning the duckspeak and dogspeak of his long lost parents.

* Gluon is not literally a "he" nor a "she", but something in between. The author has referred to Gluon as "he/she/it" in the past, but finds that construction too bulky. Therefore, we've arbitrarily chosen to use "he" for the sake of convenience. You are free to use whatever pronoun you choose.

** Bratched: A cross between "born" and "hatched". It's uncertain whether Gluon was born live, hatched from an egg, or some hard to imagine combination of the two.

I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dreamed that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest. It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city And in all their looks and words.